I should be preparing for work. 8+ hours of it.
I need off of duty tonight so I can get some stiff drinks, just a little help from my friends. But they seem to be few and far between. Everyone wants to bargain and I’m too bitter to conceed.
I watched my grandparents wither over the past few months, their organs giving way to cancer. My grandfather passed a week ago today. Reaching his hand for my grandmother in this world he passed into quiet endless sleep, leaving her behind to pour out her emotions onto us, the living.
There is so much injustice in the waiting she must now endure. Moans, intense with the pain of disease and lonliness overtaking her body, echo in my skull. I can’t get this picture out of my head:
Carrying myself through the hallway of Beverly Nursing Facility the obligatory smell of urine
asaulting my senses, I pause before looking around the corner of 106. “She is totally out of
it” said my uncle before I left the house. Slowly entering I can’t locate my grandmother.
Instead there is a holocaust victim angled in some obtruse and disturbing manner, in her
bed. The skin is pulled tight around the bone, no fat to puff those once gloriously roughed
cheeks and the lips that I always knew to be a pouty model red, cracked inwards towards
the regions of empty gums. The half opened eyes unresponsive to movements or
greetings and the rigid hands, as to incinuate rigamortis. My mother walked in behind me,
sucking in her breath starting “Is she…” .
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